‘You gotta have faith’: Taking a chance and trusting the outcome

How is one family able to sustain a farm for eight generations? The quick answer could be: tradition. But look around at the rarity of this phenomenon today, and it’s easy to see that simply doing what your forefathers did is not going to create a future for your children.

Drill a little deeper and you’ll get nearer to the truth, or taste a Bosman wine and experience the difference.

Fides, Spes et Amor or Faith, Hope and Love is the Bosman Family motto, and it points to the secret of their success.

For Bosman Winemaker Corlea Fourie, winemaking is a careful balancing act between nurturing the soil, the vines and the wines; and exploring new and better ways of doing things in order to create something special, but with the same standard of excellence we have come to trust.

“Winemaking can become a seamless process where the aim is to eliminate any room for error,” she says. “But then we stagnate, producing the same old, same old. So we are constantly trying something new here, using new technology and looking at ancient practices and seeing where we can make something that is really good. Not just good tasting, but good for us and good for the people and the place it comes from.

And that’s where Fides comes in.

Orange wines hit our shelves a few years ago with an edgy array from the Young Guns. However, it is hardly a new phenomenon, in fact orange wines have been made for 6 000 years, originating in Georgia and Northern Italy. Yet the process is still the same: white grapes are fermented on their skins giving the wine a golden/orange colour and a complex texture, tannin and flavour. Corlea describes these wines as showing “the next level in fruit maturation”.

“So instead of simply tasting fruit or flowers,” she explains, “these wines taste of bruised apple, pot pourri and candied peel. They have a savoury finish which marries well with complex food flavours such as dim sum, sticky pork or even slow roasted lamb and can be served slightly less chilled than a conventional white to allow the oak flavours a chance to express themselves.”

The Bosman Family Vineyards Fides 2015 was made from a single vineyard of Grenache Blanc which was naturally fermented over three weeks with daily punch downs and pump-overs. The wine was then gently pressed, aged in older Russian oak for 6 months and in the bottle for another 6 months before being released.

As it is a limited release wine, it is only available from the farm, via the website www.bosmanwines.com and in selected restaurants (?).

So we trust you’ll buy this wine, we hope you try it, but we know you will love it.

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